In 2015, I was doing local SEO for a few personal injury firms, and I added one of my clients to Thumbtack. I thought it was a decent local citation. Nothing more than that.
About a week later, my client forwarded me an email from Thumbtack support. It offered him 30 points if he added a link to his Thumbtack profile from his own website. Then it gave him the code to paste.
The anchor text was already written into it. The word was "legal."
That is the whole story, and anyone who works in links should sit with it for a second. They did not ask him for a mention. They did not ask him to write about the service. They sent the finished HTML with the keyword sitting in the anchor and asked him to email back the URL so they could credit his account.
I reported it to Google, and I made it public. Google issued Thumbtack a manual action for unnatural links, and the site fell out of search.
"Points" is doing a lot of work in that sentence
When the story broke, the defense was that the points were meaningless. Cosmetic. A little profile badge, nothing you could spend.
Read Google's own policy on link schemes. It does not say money. It says exchanging goods or services for links. Anything of value counts, which is the entire point of writing it that way, because otherwise every scheme on earth would simply pay in something other than cash.
Inside Thumbtack, value converted into leads, and leads converted into money. Professionals bought credits to bid on jobs. So a currency that improves your standing in that system is not a souvenir. It is a discount on customer acquisition.
The people defending the practice made the argument for me. One of them wrote, in the same comment, that the points were useless and that a stronger points total meant a more complete profile and better conversions. Both of those cannot be true. If it lifts conversions, it has value. If it has value and you hand it over for a link, you bought the link.
That is the loophole, and it is not a small one. Pay in cash, and everyone recognizes it instantly. Pay in a currency you invented, redeemable only inside a system you own, and it looks like a loyalty program.
Google was not confused by it. The manual action landed anyway.
The anchor is the confession
If you want to know whether a link was earned, look at who chose the anchor text.
When a link is genuinely editorial, the writer chooses it. And writers do a very predictable thing. They use your brand name, a bare URL, or a natural phrase like the name of the thing you built. They are not thinking about your rankings. They are thinking about their sentence.
An engineered anchor exists for exactly one reason. Somebody needed a link that was never going to be given freely, so they had to specify what it should say. The moment the anchor is written by the party receiving the link, the link was not earned. It was ordered.
I did not have to interpret anything in that email. The anchor was sitting right there in the copy-paste block.
What made it a story
Google Capital had led a 100 million dollar investment in Thumbtack the year before. That is the fact that turned a small blog post into an international one. It ran in the US trade press and got picked up in Germany, Spain, and Indonesia.
Google enforced the rule anyway. Whatever anyone wants to read into it, that is what happened. The company had product, traction, and Google's own investment money behind it, and the manual action landed regardless.
The part nobody enjoys talking about
I want to be honest about the rest of it, because link building conversations tend to skip this.
Publishing that post made a lot of people angry. Thumbtack professionals wrote to tell me the deindexing had cost them real money that week. One told me I was costing people their jobs. The comment thread on that post is still not pleasant reading.
I understood the anger, and I still think reporting it was right. But it taught me something I did not expect. When a link scheme gets big enough, it stops being a technical violation and becomes an ecosystem, and a lot of decent people end up standing on top of it without ever knowing what it is built from.
That is the real cost of buying links. It is not the penalty. It is that by the time the shortcut collapses, other people are depending on it.
The tactics changed, the tell did not
Brokers still promise manual outreach and still quietly work the same recycled lists. I started Asset Linkable after testing a stack of them and watching the same names come back again and again. The economics force it. Genuine editorial outreach is slow and it fails often, which is a terrible foundation for a monthly retainer, so the industry built a shadow supply chain instead.
What changed is the payoff. AI systems decide what to cite based on whether something is worth citing. They are not counting your referring domains. A recycled list cannot manufacture the one thing that gets you into an answer, and that thing is being genuinely worth referencing.
So the floor rose. A bought link is worth less than it was. An earned link is worth more, because it is attached to something a machine can justify quoting.
The test
Look at your anchor distribution and ask yourself one question. Would you be comfortable showing it to the people who supposedly linked to you?
If the honest answer is no, you already know what you are holding. Thumbtack had a real product, real traction, and a hundred million dollars of Google's own investment behind it, and it still went to zero in search.
Nobody is too big to get caught. Most people simply have not been caught yet.
About Donnie Strompf
Donnie Strompf is the founder of Good At Marketing and Asset Linkable, a link-building consultancy focused on earning editorial backlinks through linkable asset construction. In 2015 he reported Thumbtack's link acquisition tactics to Google, which resulted in a manual action against the company.